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Thinking the Difference: on Feminism and Postcolony Anne Castaing

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Thinking the Difference: on Feminism and Postcolony Anne Castaing Thinking the Difference: On Feminism and Postcolony Anne Castaing To cite this version: Anne Castaing. Thinking the Difference: On Feminism and Postcolony. South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, Association pour la recherche sur l’Asie du Sud, 2014, http://samaj.revues.org/3689. hal-01015218 HAL Id: hal-01015218 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01015218 Submitted on 26 Jun 2014 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Thinking the Difference: On Feminism and Postcolony Anne Castaing Research fellow, ARIAS‐Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris The recent publication in France of two volumes on South Asian feminism and its reception in the West — Danielle Haase‐Dubosc et al.’s Enjeux contemporains du féminisme indien (2003) and Martine van Woerkens’ Nous ne sommes pas des fleurs. Deux siècles de combats féministes en Inde (2010) — has raised several key issues regarding the complex and somewhat ambiguous collusion between feminist thought and postcolonial theory. Much has been written (Kiswar 1985, Chatterjee 1993, Sarkar 1999 & 2001) on the ambiguity linked to the evaluation of the social, familial, cultural, political, historical, and especially symbolic role of women in South Asia: how should one interpret Indian patriarchy when the familial and social subjugation of women stands in contrast to symbolic figures of domination, power, and anger as well as major political and historical figures?1 How should one interpret the colonial discourse aimed at emancipating the Indian ‘veiled woman’ depicted as the victim of traditional barbarism? And how should one understand the figure of the sacrificial female warrior who inhabits the Indian literary landscape along with the docile housewife embodied by Sita? The omnipresence of women’s issues in South Asian political and historical discourses can nevertheless assume an attempt to ‘speak for’ women, and thus to reduce them to silence. This well‐worn idea, generalized by Gayatri C. Spivak’s overly acclaimed article ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ ([1988] 1994), nonetheless raises a crucial question, which could suggest practical implications for Spivak’s convoluted line of questioning: is a history of women as subjects possible? Can women speak, whether in history books or across historical literature? The introductory statement from Kamla Bhasin and Ritu Menon’s exemplary essay, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’ s Partition, paves the way for an alternative (feminist) reading of history: ‘What is presented here is in the nature of an exploration, an attempt to communicate an experience of partition through those whose voices have hitherto been absent in any retelling of it: women who were destitute in one way or another by the event’ (1998: xi). ‘Experience’, ‘voice’, ‘absence’, ‘retelling’, ‘destitution’: these are the keywords for a historiographical project aiming to give voice to that absence through a direct and liberated expression of the experience by ‘polyphonizing’ the historical narrative. If the ‘history from below’ of subaltern studies aims at this rereading ‘against the grain’ of the colonial (and postcolonial) history of India by highlighting the ‘daily forms of resistance’, it suggests above all a ‘redefinition’ of the archive itself: wherever the traditional archive is insufficient (particularly concerning women’s history), recourse to ‘different’ sources – in which the ‘subaltern voice’ can be heard2 – is necessary. These include first‐hand accounts of women abducted during 1 Stéphanie Tawa Lama‐Rewal (2004) identifies common analogies between female political figures and mythological figures, particularly the goddess Shakti, the female power, which for example justifies the authoritarian use of power by Indira Gandhi. 2 At least compared to ‘more conventional and direct sources’ according to the historian Sudhir Chandra (1985: 180), which justifies his use of literature as allowing it to underline the communal consciousness in the late 19th century: ‘Nowhere is [the] ambivalence [between communalism and nationalism] better exhibited than in contemporary literature. For in matters relating to consciousness, the more conventional and direct sources on which historians usually rely for their construction of reality do not offer the kind of material and insights that literature does’. Partition in Bhasin and Menon’ s as well as Urvashi Butalia’ s essays, autobiographical narratives in Tanika Sarkar’ s essay (1993), and literary texts in the works of Aamir Mufti (2000) and Partha Chatterjee (1993). It is through the alternative that feminist history is constructed; it is in the margins that is woven the history of this ‘silenced subaltern’ whom Spivak seeks to expose. Focusing on the ‘modes’ and the ‘means’ of representation (of the subaltern, or women in a postcolonial context) sheds light on one of the main issues raised by the collusion between the subaltern studies discourse (or, by extension, the postcolonial studies discourse) and feminist discourses: how do we narrate the ‘Oriental Woman’, the ‘Third‐World Woman’, without speaking for her, without condemning her to an archetype (the docile wife or the vengeful goddess)? In other words, how can one emancipate feminism from monolithic thought that is euro‐centered? Thus, how do one edify a feminism that could consider cultural specificities, which would be consistent with this ‘historically muted subject of the subaltern woman’ in Spivak’s words ([1988]1994:295), and understand identity as being ‘relational and historical’? The gender issue in a postcolonial context follows a tormented path, which colludes with the polemical history of the ethnocentrism of Western academic discourses and their universalist agenda. The ‘second wave’ of Western feminist critique – concerned with identifying the ramifications of the patriarchal structures aiming at oppressing women as a whole, thus striving to identify a ‘main enemy’ and ‘unique type of oppression’3 – was rapidly subject to controversies within the ranks. Identifying a ‘unique enemy’ had the consequence of erasing all the specificities (whether social, racial, cultural, or sexual) of this oppression and, consecutively, of denying all other cumulative forms of oppression. Black Feminism, for example, denounced the universalizing elitism of such discourses, which are produced by and for the white, middle‐class, heterosexual woman.4 Such criticism was crucial as it helped focus attention on identity, with all its heterogeneity, and thus denied universalism and categories, including that of the ‘oppressed group’. In this regard, the ‘sorority’ claimed by the main feminist wave of the 1970s, which called for solidarity within a common struggle against male oppression, can be seen not only as utopian but also as a negation of the differences against which the ‘third feminist wave’ rose up on a massive scale. This condemnation aimed at promoting a feminism that would be racially, socially, and sexually aware, and which identified as its ‘main enemy’ the sum of the systems of oppression in Western countries. It also sought to edify a ‘postcolonial feminism’ – a ‘postcolonially aware’ feminist discourse stemming from an articulation of gender oppression, class/caste/ethnic group/race oppression, and also geographical and historical oppression as an extension of the Orientalist discourses. Using the example of Julia Kristeva’s essay About Chinese Women (1974) as the paradigm of Western discourse on the Third‐World oppressed woman, Spivak, for instance, censures certain aspects of ‘French feminism’ and identifies a simplistic and universalizing conception of women along with a typically Orientalist essencialization of the ‘Other’.5 The universalism and ethnocentrism of certain feminist discourses whose ‘adepts’, as Ann du Cille writes, ‘continue to see whiteness as so natural, normative and unproblematic that racial identity is a property only of the non‐white’ (1996: 100), gave rise to a wave of questioning, which in turn led to renewed reflection on the arbitrary categorizations instituted by feminist discourses and extended the quest for specificity to an extra‐European dimension. It thus promoted the systematic 3 In reference to the title and argument of Christine Delphy’s paradigmatic essay (1998 & 2001). 4 See notably bell hooks’ work on Western feminists’ racial stereotypes (hooks 2003). In the same volume, see also the Black Feminist poet Audre Lorde’s excellent text 5 See Gayatri Spivak (1981). integration of cultural, geographical, and historical features in any discourse on women, on their representation, and on patriarchy. In this vein, Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1991, 2003) advocates a ‘feminism without borders’, which promotes both the decolonization of feminism and the acknowledgement of differences and thus of borders. She criticizes the way Western feminist theory colonizes the heterogeneity of the experience of ‘Third‐World women’, and urges for the deconstruction of the image erected by the discourses stemming from Western humanism.
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